They were like a surgical team and she was the head surgeon. Their operating room was a conference hall inside the U.S. Supreme Court and their patients, over nearly two decades, were justices of that highest chamber.

Her son and daughter-in-law were responsible for the logistics and the photography. Her job: With just a brief exchange, extract the essence of each judge’s persona and prepare to transplant it into a life-sized painting.

Thankfully, Georgianna B. Nyman Aronson was as gifted in conversation as in art.

“They typically gave us a 20-minute window with the justices, which always turned into an hour and a half or more once they met my mother,” Ben Aronson recalled.

“Once they met her, they weren’t in the room anymore, they weren’t in DC anymore, they weren’t in the Supreme Court,” he said. “Somehow, she had accessed part of them that they hadn’t visited in a long time.”

Between 1991 and 2009, Nyman Aronson made portraits of justices Sandra Day O’Connor, Harry Blackmun, Clarence Thomas, Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. They are displayed at New England Law in Boston.

A painter, musician, and longtime Sudbury resident, Nyman Aronson died of cancer on June 10, hours before her 87th birthday. A sister, three children, three grandchildren, and one great granddaughter survive her.

Art hangs from nearly every branch of Nyman Aronson’s family tree.

Born on June 11, 1930, she endured the messy divorce of her mother and alcoholic father, a prominent physician. She and her two siblings journeyed the foster care system before finding a home with their grandparents in Malden.

Annie Benson Muller, her grandmother, was well-known for watercolors of babies and children, which most famously adorned the calendars for Hood’s Milk.

Once, a suitor arriving for Nyman Aronson at her grandmother’s house noticed a watercolor of a baby hanging on the wall. He remarked on the high quality of the “reproduction” of an artist he himself had copied – and soon learned was standing right in front of him.

Despite the gaffe, Aronson married the man, David Aronson, the father of her children and partner of more than 60 years. In the mid-1950s, they purchased a vacant lot and built a home together in Sudbury.

David Aronson was a renowned and internationally known Expressionist painter and sculptor who served as the first chairman of what is now the School of Visual Arts at Boston University. The New York Times memorialized his death in July 2015 at age 91.

David and “Georgie” mingled with many of the cultural and civic elites of their time, from fellow artists to rich collectors to prominent physicians.

He was the strict, loving father with high standards who often had to be dragged out of the house for social engagements.

She was the mother who, when out to dinner in recent years, would turn with excitement to her adult children and say as if they were kids: “Now, you can order whatever you want!”

“It became kind of this funny thing that always made us smile, but underneath it was kind of her recipe for life,” Ben Aronson said. “Here is this smorgasbord in front of you and it’s up to you to choose what you want and act on it.”

In art, parenthood, friendship and fleeting exchanges with strangers, Nyman Aronson didn’t just look for the best in people – she found it. People opened up to her, and her portraits opened up the world to them.

“She was very disarming,” Ben Aronson said. “It didn’t matter if it was a plumber out in the country or if it was a young child or if it was dignitaries and statesmen from Washington, D.C.”

Antonin Scalia reminisced to her about his youthful aspirations to become a concert pianist. (Nyman Aronson later mailed him a piano score he had never seen or heard, much to his delight.) Harry Blackmun gushed about his grandchildren.

During the Supreme Court visits, Ben Aronson would take hundreds of photographs that his mother would paint from over the next many months. Nyman Aronson had to shadow her son as he circled the justices, to keep the photo subjects from looking away, toward her.

“Her interest in people and her understanding of human nature was underneath all of her portrait work,” Ben Aronson said. “She always talked about trying her best to validate the very best in people.”

Being a mother, she felt, was the greatest creative activity of all. She raised a Berklee guitar professor, Abigail Aronson Zocher, a veterinarian, Judy Aronson Webb, and a painter, Ben Aronson, whose two sons are also professional artists.

Around 1984, after her first two years at Boston University, Abigail Aronson wanted to transfer to the New England Conservatory, where she could major in guitar.

Her dad wasn’t so sure that was a good idea at first, since she was attending BU for free. Her mom withdrew the remainder of a personal bank account to make it happen.

“She literally drove me up to the front door of the dorm, handed me a check and told me to go and reserve a spot in the dorm,” Abigail Aronson said. “It was just a deposit on a dorm, but it was everything she had.”

Like her daughter, Nyman Aronson was also a musician. A gifted pianist and professional singer, she studied at Longy School of Music in Cambridge under Russian-born soprano (and later family friend) Olga Averino.

“She never wanted to have to choose. She loved them both,” Ben Aronson said of his mother’s interest in music and art. “She believed that they were different externalizations of the same spirit, the creative spirit.”

Bald and sick with cancer near the end of her life, Nyman Aronson still retained her vitality. Ann Braithwaite, a friend, visited her at home one day while she was recovering between hospital visits. She insisted Braithwaite’s husband try on her wig.

“He looked hilarious,” Braithwaite said. “She had a great sense of humor, a great sense of people.

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